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The consequences of actionsIn J. Copeland (ed.), Logic and Reality, Oxford University Press. pp. 273-99. 1996.
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93Hume, the BAD Paradox, and Value RealismPhilo 4 (2): 109-122. 2001.A recent slew of arguments, if sound, would demonstrate that realism about value involves a kind of paradox-I call it the BAD paradox.More precisely, they show that if there are genuine propositions about the good, then one could maintain harmony between one’s desires and one’s beliefs about the good only on pain of violating fundamental principles of decision theory. I show. however, the BAD paradox turns out to be a version of Newcomb’s problem, and that the cognitivist about value can avoid t…Read more
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1On a dogma concerning realism and incommensurabilityIn R. Nola (ed.), Relativism and Realism in Science, Reidel. pp. 169-293. 1988.
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413A refutation of Peircean idealismIn Cheyne C. (ed.), Rationality and Reality, Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 155-66. 2006.
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158Verisimilitude by power relationsBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 41 (1): 129-135. 1990.A number of different theories of truthlikeness have been proposed, but most can be classified into one of two different main programmes: the probability-content programme and the likeness programme.1 In Brink and Heidema [1987] we are offered a further proposal, with the attraction of some novelty. I argue that while the heuristic path taken by the authors is rather remote from what they call ‘the well-worn paths’,2 in fact their point of arrival is rather closer to existing proposals within th…Read more
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68Miller's so-called paradox of informationBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 30 (3): 253-261. 1979.
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70Supervenience, goodness, and higher-order universalsAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 69 (1). 1991.Supervenience theses promise ontological economy without reducibility. The problem is that they face a dilemma: either the relation of supervenience entails reducibility or it is mysterious. Recently higher-order universals have been invoked to avoid the dilemma. This article develops a higher-order framework in which this claim can be assessed. It is shown that reducibility can be avoided, but only at the cost of a rather radical metaphysical proposal.
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The picture theory of truthlikenessIn Kuipers T. (ed.), What is Closer-to-the-Truth, Rodopi. pp. 25-46. 1987.
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488Non-Naturalist Moral Realism, Autonomy and EntanglementTopoi 37 (4): 607-620. 2018.It was something of a dogma for much of the twentieth century that one cannot validly derive an ought from an is. More generally, it was held that non-normative propositions do not entail normative propositions. Call this thesis about the relation between the natural and the normative Natural-Normative Autonomy. The denial of Autonomy involves the entanglement of the natural with the normative. Naturalism entails entanglement—in fact it entails the most extreme form of entanglement—but entanglem…Read more
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1Truthlikeness and the convexity of propositionsIn Kuipers T. (ed.), What is Closer-to-the-Truth, Rodopi. pp. 197-217. 1987.
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31Creative valueInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 33 (3). 1990.Free agents can create and destroy value, for how much value is realized may well depend on what such agents choose to do. Not only may such agents create and destroy value, but such creation and destruction seem to involve a dimension of value: I call it creative value. An explication of the twin concepts of creating value and creative value is given, motivated by two desiderata. It is then shown that creative value turns out to be equivalent to what Nozick has dubbed originative value, when hi…Read more
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2Is the Treaty of Waitangi a Social ContractIn Oddie Graham & Perrett Roy W. (eds.), Justice, Ethics and New Zealand Society, Oxford University Press. pp. 73-90. 1992.
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138Value, reality, and desireClarendon Press. 2005.Value, Reality, and Desire is an extended argument for a robust realism about value. The robust realist affirms the following distinctive theses. There are genuine claims about value which are true or false--there are facts about value. These value-facts are mind-independent - they are not reducible to desires or other mental states, or indeed to any non-mental facts of a non-evaluative kind. And these genuine, mind-independent, irreducible value-facts are causally efficacious. Values, quite lit…Read more
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311The poverty of the Popperian program for truthlikenessPhilosophy of Science 53 (2): 163-178. 1986.The importance for realism of the concept of truthlikeness was first stressed by Popper. Popper himself not only mapped out a program for defining truthlikeness (in terms of falsity content and truth content) but produced the first definitions within this program. These were shown to be inadequate. But the program lingered on, and the most recent attempt to revive it is that of Newton-Smith. His attempt is a failure, not because of some minor defect or technical flaw in his particular account bu…Read more
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What agents can doIn N. Foo (ed.), Record of the Workshop on Logic and Action, University of Sydney. pp. 144-61. 1994.
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577Thinking Globally, Acting Locally: Partiality, Preferences and PerspectiveLes ateliers de l'éthique/The Ethics Forum 9 (2): 57-81. 2014.A rather promising value theory for environmental philosophers combines the well-known fitting attitude (FA) account of value with the rather less well-known account of value as richness. If the value of an entity is proportional to its degree of richness (which has been cashed out in terms of unified complexity and organic unity), then since natural entities, such as species or ecosystems, exhibit varying degrees of richness quite independently of what we happen to feel about them, they also po…Read more
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156Killing and letting-die: Bare differences and clear differencesPhilosophical Studies 88 (3): 267-287. 1997.
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Partial Interpretation, Meaning Variance, and IncommensurabilityIn Kostas Gavroglu, Yourgos Goudaroulis & P. Nicolacopolous (eds.), Imre Lakatos and Theories of Scientific Change, Reidel. pp. 305-22. 1989.
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142Backwards causation and the permanence of the pastSynthese 85 (1). 1990.Can a present or future event bring about a past event? An answer to this question is demanded by many other interesting questions. Can anybody, even a god, do anything about what has already occurred? Should we plan for the past, as well as for the future? Can anybody precognise the future in a way quite different from normal prediction? Do the causal laws and the past jointly preclude free action? Does current physical theory entail a consistent version of backwards causation? Recent articles …Read more
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ControlIn R. Durrant (ed.), Essays in Honour of Gwen Taylor, University of Otago Press. pp. 190-210. 1981.
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Values educationIn Harvey Siegel (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Education, Oxford University Press. 2009.
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119Axiological atomismAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 79 (3). 2001.Value is either additive or else it is subject to organic unity. In general we have organic unity where a complex whole is not simply the sum of its parts. Value exhibits organic unity if the value of a complex, whether a complex state or complex quality, is greater or less than the sum of the values of its components or parts. Whether or not value is additive might be thought to be of purely metaphysical interest, but it is also connected with important aspects of evaluative reasoning. Additivi…Read more
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181TruthlikenessStanford Encyclopedia. 2014.Truth is the aim of inquiry. Nevertheless, some falsehoods seem to realize this aim better than others. Some truths better realize the aim than other truths. And perhaps even some falsehoods realize the aim better than some truths do. The dichotomy of the class of propositions into truths and falsehoods should thus be supplemented with a more fine-grained ordering — one which classifies propositions according to their closeness to the truth, their degree of truthlikeness or verisimilitude. The l…Read more
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Truth, verification, confirmation, verisimilitudeIn Smelser Niel J. (ed.), International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, Elsevier. pp. 12857-64. 2001.
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2Truth and TruthlikenessIn Michael Glanzberg (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Truth, Oxford University Press. 2018.
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Experiences of valueIn Charles R. Pigden (ed.), Hume on Motivation and Virtue, Palgrave-macmillan. pp. 121. 2009.
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